AMHERST, Mass.—William Taubman, the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, is among the 187 artists, scholars and scientists awarded 2006 fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Taubman will use this award to support the research he is undertaking for a biography of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, which will be the first full scholarly biography utilizing the wealth of new information that has become available since 1991.

Taubman is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003). A member of the Amherst faculty since 1967, he was educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities. An associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, chair of the Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and a former International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations with the Department of State, Taubman is the author of many books. He wrote Moscow Spring (1989) with his wife, Jane Taubman, a professor of Russian at Amherst College, Stalin’s American Policy (1982), Governing Soviet Cities (1973) and The View from Lenin Hills (1967). He has contributed to The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune, among many other newspapers, magazines and journals.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Each fellow receives a grant for a minimum of six months and a maximum of 12 months. Since the purpose of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is to help provide fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible, grants are made freely. No special conditions attach to them, and fellows may spend their grant funds in any manner they deem necessary to their work.